The Benefits of Gamification are many and varies from Industry to Industry. Game Mechanics and Game Features are designed to Boost certain Metrics. In Gamification it is critical to monitor the performance of your Metrics closely to insure you are getting the best results possible and that your players are happy. This list is meant to be a starting point and used to help categorize Game Mechanics and Game Features based on their potential benefits.

Gamification Metrics

These are measurable metrics for success in the Gamification Process.

Engagement

Engagement is by far the most important metric for success in Gamification. For this reason, we've grouped all other metrics under Engagement because it goes without saying that if Engagement is higher, generally the other metrics will be as well.

Standard Engagement Metrics are:

Unique visitors

Page views per visitor

Time spent on site

Total time spent per user

Frequency of visits

Depth of visit

Participation

Conversions

With the importance of Engagement being realized and with the continual advancements in analytics we believe that Engagement will become the most watched metric for the web and beyond.

Influence

Gamification can give you influence over your users actions. This can happen over time such as people visiting X page more often because you've incentivized it or built unique content such as quests to promote it. Also influence can be instantaneous if you have built Gamification content that you can push to players instantly to give them some offer, challenge etc. Keep in mind, influence should not always be considered a bad thing. Good UI influences users. Influence also could even relate in Education to influencing students to complete their homework.

Loyalty

Loyalty as a metric can mean many things. Google Analytics would call this a user that returns with great frequency. Loyalty in Gamification also refers to users constantly picking your brand over a competing brand given that all offers are equal.

UGC

User Generated Content, or UGC, is extremely important to many websites. User Generated content could be pictures, video or other media uploaded or it could be something as simple as comments on a page.

Time Spent

Time Spent is straight forward, each user spends more time per visit than they did before.

Virality

Virality represents users talking more about your brand, through social networks, direct contact online and word of mouth. With Gamification, virality can be that you've incentivized a user to share with their friends or invite friends in for a specific activity as part of the gameplay.

Gamification Non-Metrics

These Benefits are listed separately from the rest because they are very important benefits you should hope for with Gamification however they are usually not used as a metric for success in Gamification.

Fun

Fun is not easy to measure, but it's definitely a major benefit of Gamification. Things are generally better if they're more fun, and why wouldn't we want the entire world to be more fun, including life? The Fun Theory is worth exploring, the idea that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behavior for the better.

Revenue

Through influence, virality and almost every other benefit of Gamification you can expect an increase in Revenue if you are in an already revenue making business.

SEO

SEO is another Benefit of Gamification that isn't as easy to measure as many things affect SEO but it is clear that if you increase Engagement, Virality and User Generated Content that SEO will see a huge boost.